Carlisle Indians Made It A Whole New Ballgame

In popular histories, the first use of the forward pass on a major collegiate stage tends to be wrongly ascribed to Notre Dame in 1913, and the tandem of Gus Dorais and Knute Rockne. In fact, the Indians were the first team to throw the ball deeply and regularly downfield, in 1907.

Up until 1906, if a player threw the ball at all, he pitched it underhanded, sidearmed it or lobbed it through the air end over end. Though the pass was legalized that season, almost none of the major teams in the East dared to use it. It simply was too unfamiliar and awkward. Even Warner believed the pass was "good for gains at times, but not at all regularly."

Though it's difficult to imagine now, the concept of a spiral was not an obvious one then. Two men seem to have hit on the idea at about the same time: Warner, who realized that throwing the ball point first would present less surface to the air and make it travel farther, and a coach named Eddie Cochems at Saint Louis University, who decided that holding the ball by the laces offered the most secure grip.

The first downfield, overhand spiral was completed on Sept. 5, 1906, when Saint Louis quarterback Bradbury Robinson threw to teammate Jack Schneider in an obscure game against Carroll College. A more notable pass was recorded when Wesleyan completed one against Yale on Oct. 3. Carlisle may deserve partial credit for that throw: Wesleyan's coach, Howard R. "Bosey" Reiter, claimed he learned how to throw a spiral from an unidentified Carlisle Indian in 1903, when Reiter coached the semipro Philadelphia Football Athletics and an Indian was on the team. The only other significant pass that season was thrown by Yale, which gained a first down that led to victory over Harvard when Paul Veeder threw 30 yards to Bob Forbes.

By the start of the '07 campaign, most major teams still considered the pass too exotic and unsound, and refused to practice it. But as Warner watched the Indians work out in the fall of '07, he found that they had already become "deadly accurate" in the long pass. The squad that gathered on the practice field that September was Carlisle's most talented ever, so rich in ability that Warner considered it "about as perfect a football machine as I ever sent on the field." They put his imagination to work.

The Indians were led at quarterback by Frank Mount Pleasant, a 19-year-old Tuscarora-Iroquois chief's son from just outside of Niagara Falls with deceptive looks. Mount Pleasant only weighed somewhere between 130 and 140 pounds, and his student card said he had a "weak heart." He was so finely built that Warner nearly dismissed him from the football team, considering him "too light and frail" for the game. "He was always begging, however, and finally, thinking his speed might be useful, I gave him a chance," Warner remembered. As it turned out, you didn't dare judge Mount Pleasant by his appearance. Games came as naturally to him "as breathing," Warner discovered. He was a springy, dodging runner with surprising leg strength, a good punter and, most unexpected of all, a great passer who could set his feet and fling the ball 50 yards downfield, on target.

He was also an accomplished pianist and an Olympic long jumper, and he would soon enter Dickinson Law School. This oddly talented young man, so in tune with himself, nonplussed Warner, who found him to be "a handsome, careless lad."

Mount Pleasant wasn't the only member of the squad who could throw. So could Pete Hauser, a burly 21-year-old Cheyenne from Oklahoma who lined up at fullback. For targets, they had two tall, fleet veteran ends in Exendine and William Gardner, a Chippewa from Turtle Mountain, N.D. Both had recently graduated but remained on campus while they took courses at Dickinson Law.

Warner's pencil strokes seemed to flicker as he drew up a new offense to take advantage of their versatility. Walter Camp -- whose personal interventions between 1878 and 1925, when he sat on every rules committee, would set football apart from rugby -- dubbed Warner's new scheme "the Carlisle formation," but later it would be known as the "single wing" for its wing-shaped appearance. Whatever it was called, it was a bolt of inspiration. It was predicated on one small move: Warner shifted a halfback out wide, to outflank the opposing tackle, forming something that looked like a wing. But it opened up a world of possibilities.

Its beauty lay in its many options and disguises. They could show one thing and then do another. They could line up as if to punt -- and then throw. No one could know whether the Indians were going to run, throw or kick out of the formation.

For added measure, on pass plays Warner taught his quarterbacks to sprint out a few yards to their left or their right, buying more time to throw. The rest of the players flooded downfield and knocked down any opponent who might be able to intercept or bat away the pass.

The players loved it. "How the Indians did take to it!" Warner remembered. "Light on their feet as professional dancers, and every one amazingly skillful with his hands, the redskins pirouetted in and out until the receiver was well down the field, and then they shot the ball like a bullet."